Doug Jacobs

I know the game came out last year and got lukewarm reviews.

Still, being a fan of Tim Schaefer, Jack Black and rock&roll in general,
this was a must-buy for me.

Overall, I'd give the game an 8/10. Wonderful concept, wonderful art,
wonderful world to wander around in, and of course, wonderful music.

The problem, as stated many times, was the RTS-esque stage battles in the
game.

However I'm loathe to call it "RTS" because it's a bit different than a
normal RTS since you aren't just some hovering eye-in-the-sky, directing
your guys around. At the same time, it's not quite as action friendly
like your typical brawler (Dynasty Warriors, or Marvel Alliance come to
mind here.)

A lot of the forums I read were from folks who claimed to hate the RTS
genre, or at least thought they weren't very good at those types of
games. Fair enough, but the amount of strategy needed here was little
more than "build army, capture fan spounts (resources), attack enemy
stage." The problem was knowing what units to build, and being able to
juggle your army while running around the field whacking enemies or
playing guitar solos. When the enemy would attack, it becomes a frantic
game of rock-paper-scissors. Oh, it's this unit, so I should do
this...etc.

Problem is that the game doesn't really give you much in terms of time to
learn the ropes, and even at the end I still had problems remembering which
shoulder button was supposed to do what.

Most battles also had a "twist" you had to deal with, but without knowing
what that was in advance, it was very common to have a good first part of
a battle, then end up losing everything when the twist was revealed.
OOoh, I had to know I was going to need to do THIS... At which point you
have no choice but to restart and try again...until you hit the NEXT
unforeseen twist.

Pretty much you had to already know the battle from start to finish, and
then just move FAST. Giving your opponent time to build up resources just
means you're going to be facing more advanced units that require a lot
more effort to kill.

I really missed not having a radar type display. It would have made
things a lot easier if I could see at a glance where the enemy is, where
my forces are, and where I am. Since I have to be top of my troops to get
them to follow me, it'd be good to know where everything is at any time.

It seems wrong to me to punish the player for not having already played
the missions for the first few time or even second and third times.

Once you knew fully what to expect, the missions were easy, but the
constant restarts got annoying.

Anyways with that one done it's onto Marvel Alliance 2. Oh joy. I have
ot seriously perform 24*23 fusions? Time to get out the spreadsheet...


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It's not broken. It's...advanced.